Over the Line

by Steve Howell

  I was still struggling with this. I wasn’t sure I was ready to say I believed her beyond any doubt. Mimi sensed my difficulty.

  “So what happened between you and Will,” she asked, “when you found out he’d failed a drugs test?”

  I was watching Megan closely now to see if her body language gave anything away, but she didn’t blink or flinch or wriggle or give me any sense of feeling awkward.

  “I dumped him of course,” she said, with a welcome hint of indignation that it might be in doubt. “We had a massive row at his flat. By this time, he’d got a job and had left home – we were practically living together – but I walked out on him. My parents were thinking of moving back to west Wales, so I had most of my stuff at Will’s, but I couldn’t stay there.”

  “But you were together the night Matt died?” Mimi said.

  “Yes, that was a few weeks later, after Christmas. I’d moved everything back out of his flat by then, and I was living back home, but I didn’t know what to do, what with my parents planning to leave Newport. I’d been thinking about going to London, but…” Megan’s face turned as red as it does after a hard training session.

  Mimi looked across the bed at me and raised her eyebrows.

  “But… you know,” Megan said, “I couldn’t let him go completely.”

  “So you were still seeing each other?” Mimi said.

  Megan looked at me sheepishly and then turned towards Mimi. “He was a shag,” she said, with an embarrassed chuckle. “We ended up in bed a few times, and I think Will hoped we’d get back together. He kept apologising – over and over again – for being such a twat, for ruining his own career and risking mine. And I suppose I was still fond of him. But there was no way back, not for me.”

  “So that night…?” Mimi asked, tentatively.

  “That night…” Megan closed her eyes and sat completely still for a long moment. She still hadn’t opened them when she started speaking again, sounding like she was reeling off lines from a script. “It was just a normal Saturday. None of us had any money to go out. It was a few weeks after Christmas and we were all skint. So Will had a house party, at his flat. There weren’t many of us there. It was boring to be honest. We sat around playing drinking games, same old things.”

  “And Matt was in a bad way?” I said.

  Megan laughed. “Oh no. Matt wasn’t there. God knows where he was. We never found out where he’d been. He could have been anywhere. Matt did his own thing – you never knew when he’d turn up. He was really out of control by then. He had been for months: always looking for the next high, wanting it to be better than the last. Our parties weren’t exciting enough for him.”

  “So… I don’t understand?” I said. “What happened? I thought Matt died after the party.”

  Megan was staring at the wall, looking like she was ready to break down, her face drained and tense. Mimi sat up and dropped her legs over the edge of the bed so that she was close enough to Meg to take her hand.

  “Everyone had left,” Megan said, closing her eyes. “They’d gone home or gone clubbing. Including that girl who heckled me today, Hannah. She was there but left early. I suppose it was about two o’clock in the morning by the time everyone had gone. I don’t know, I lost track of time. I was going to stay over with Will, and we were in his kitchen, clearing-up and talking. Then Matt turned up, banging on the front door. Will went down to let him in, and he had to practically carry him up the stairs.”

  Megan let out a long breath and drew another one in. Mimi squeezed her hand.

  “Will sort of dropped Matt onto this chair in the kitchen, and he slumped over the table. I just looked at him. If I’m honest…” Megan stopped and bit her lower lip, staring at the wall again. “If I’m honest, I was pissed-off with him. I was angry. I know it sounds terrible but I had no patience left for him. I’d had enough of seeing him like that. But Will gave him some water, and it was odd… Matt started getting agitated and stood up and was pacing around the kitchen. I can’t remember exactly what he was saying. Most of it didn’t make any sense anyway. He was slurring his words, just ranting about stuff, randomly slagging people off.”

  “Was it directed at you?” I asked.

  “A bit. I was always a bitch when he was drunk and drugged-up. But there was also something about Gary…” Megan looked at me.

  “That would be the Gary you don’t know?” I said.

  She waved a hand irritably in my direction, and Mimi looked equally annoyed. I knew it was bad timing, but Megan’s pretence she didn’t know Gary had dented my trust in her.

  “Yes, Gary the cop,” Megan said. “I don’t really know him, but Will says Gary runs the whole steroid thing from that gym you went to; the gym Matt and Will used. And Matt was ranting about him.”

  “Ranting about what?” Mimi said softly.

  “I don’t really know, it’s all a blur. They’d fallen out about something. I never found out because I lost it with him myself. To be honest, I didn’t give a fuck about his problem with Gary. I was angry with him for so many things – for supplying Will, for dragging me into the whole steroids thing, for the state he was in. So I told him what I thought. For months, I’d been bottling it up, and I just let rip. I told him…” Megan bit her lower lip, so hard she drew blood, “… he was a waste of space. That’s what I said. I can’t believe it now, I said he was a waste of space.”

  Mimi was still holding Megan’s hand. She squeezed it again. “You weren’t to know,” she said.

  Megan looked at her like she wasn’t there, as if seeing something else. Their faces were inches apart.

  “So what happened then?” Mimi said.

  Megan recoiled, still staring at Mimi but not right through her, seeing her now and frowning as if she was surprised by the question.

  “He died,” she said. “He died right there, in front of me, practically at my feet. I’m telling you, it was the worst…”

  Megan looked down at the floor like she was imagining Matt stretched out, and we followed her eyes, absurdly staring at the same spot as if we could all see him.

  “I’d never seen anyone die before,” Megan said, like she was gathering herself, becoming almost matter-of-fact. “It was so, I don’t know, absolute. One minute I was saying ‘You’re a waste of space’ and he was looking at me all shocked, and the next, he was clutching his chest and falling, like his knees had given way. The next thing we knew, he was on the floor, on his side with vomit spewing out of his mouth, everywhere. And he rolled onto his back and Will tried to pick him up but he was still writhing around, and then he stopped, just stopped moving completely, and Will let him go and his head dropped onto the floor. And that was it. He died. Will checked his pulse, and he said ‘He’s dead’.”

  Megan slumped back in the chair like a valve had released the pressure from bottling this story up for so long. I couldn’t be sure but it seemed like this was the first time she’d told anyone about that night, or told anyone the truth about it.

  “And Will phoned for help, did he?” I said.

  “He must have done,” Megan said, “but, to be honest, his first thought was to push me out of the door, literally. All I remember is he stood up and grabbed me by the shoulders and said, ‘You’ve got to get out of here’. We didn’t talk about it. I was so stunned I didn’t argue, and the next thing I remember is running down the street. I got a taxi home from town and luckily my parents were down in Pembrokeshire for the weekend, house-hunting. The following week I moved to London.” She shook her head, teeth gritted, seeming to want to suppress any tears. “I ran. I ran away… like a coward, a selfish fucking coward.”

  Mimi turned to me and raised her eyebrows, as if to say, ‘So now we know’. My mind was on the night she turned up at Copthall asking me to coach her. I calculated the dates. The newspaper reports said Matt died in the early hours of the January 11th, a Sunday morning. Megan was in London nine days later, talking to me about her ambitions. I tried to picture her that evening
; what she was wearing and how she looked, but it wouldn’t come back to me. All the different impressions of Megan seemed to blend into one – and besides, how would I know if there was anything unusual about her behaviour that evening? I didn’t know what her ‘normal’ was. I had never spoken to Megan before.

  “Are you ready to tell the police all this?” Mimi asked.

  “Of course…” she said, “and Graeme. I want to tell Graeme first.”

  Mimi ran a hand through Meg’s spiky hair, but she seemed distracted.

  “Oh my God… I can’t believe they’re digging Matt up,” Megan said, shaking her head. “What’s that all about? It’s gross.”

  Megan looked searchingly into Mimi’s eyes and then turned to me. For want of anything to say, I shrugged. I had no idea what that was all about.

  17

  The Blood Sample

  “She needs a lawyer,” Mimi said.

  “Why?” I said.

  “Liam, get real!” She threw her hands up in despair. “The police are exhuming Matt’s body. They’re treating his death as suspicious. And you don’t think she needs a lawyer?”

  We were still sitting in Mimi’s room, an armchair each, shadows lengthening across the bed. Megan had gone to my room to phone her parents to tell them the full story about the night of Matt’s death, before they heard it anywhere else. She’d looked terrified as she left to make the call, but I think she realised she couldn’t delay it any longer.

  I hardly knew her parents. They’d turned up to watch a couple of races, but they couldn’t travel far because of her father’s health. I had no idea how they’d react or whether they might suddenly arrive in Newport to take charge – but I was ready to carry on as proxy parent, at least for now.

  “But she hasn’t done anything wrong,” I said.

  Mimi looked even less impressed. “Well, for a start, she lied to the police,” she said.

  I needed to think about that. “Is that actually a crime?” I replied eventually.

  “It depends why she lied. What if she lied to protect Will?”

  “How would saying she wasn’t there help Will?”

  “Okay, but lying never looks good when there’s a corpse involved.”

  I cringed at that, conscious Megan was only a thin wall away. “And bringing lawyers in will only make things look worse,” I said. “It’ll make her look guilty. Why not let the police do their job, and see what happens?”

  From the incredulous look on Mimi’s face, I could see this was an argument I was never going to win.

  “Your confidence in the police is sweet, Liam,” she said.

  I smiled. She had a point. We couldn’t risk leaving it to the police. Mimi knew she’d won and started flicking through the messages on her phone.

  An image of Danny in a school play came to me – I’ve no idea why – and I couldn’t think when it was. All I could remember was his eyes darting across the audience until they settled on me, like no one else was present. Then he said his lines and when he’d finished, he turned in my direction to check I’d been watching.

  “But what I’m not clear about…” Mimi started, putting her phone down on the arm of the chair.

  There were so many things I wasn’t clear about it wasn’t a sentence I could finish for her.

  “I’ll call Jackie,” I said, “about a lawyer.”

  Mimi smiled. “And to tell her to pull Megan out of the Grand Prix,” I added.

  The Grand Prix hadn’t even been worth a discussion. We both knew it was literally a non-starter.

  “Yep. Okay,” Mimi said, “but what I’m not clear about is this blood sample found at the scene. Presumably, it’s what Richards meant when he said there was something overlooked the first time around. I was going to ask Megan if she knew, but…”

  “No, it wasn’t the best time to ask,” I said.

  Mimi shook her head in agreement. We had both been treading carefully when Megan finally opened up. Too much cross-examination could have sent her back into her shell – or sparked another storming rage.

  I called Jackie. She wasn’t in the best of moods – and that was before I’d even told her Megan’s latest revelations. The story about Matt’s body being exhumed was everywhere. The sponsors were now calling the ‘clear the air’ meeting at Crystal Palace a ‘summit’. The top executives had decided to come along, and these were people who could pull the plug on Megan on the spot. They didn’t like the sound of the police statement. They wanted to know exactly how Megan was involved. They wanted ‘assurances’.

  I listened to all this patiently. When she’d finished, I launched a guided missile into her evening.

  “Megan was there when the boy died,” I said.

  Jackie made an eerie hissing sound like she was asphyxiating on the other end of the phone. It took her several moments to digest this news. “So she was actually there?” she said finally. “You mean, that night – she saw him die?”

  “Yes, she witnessed the whole thing.”

  “And she’s been keeping this small detail to herself?”

  “Yes.”

  Jackie sighed so loudly my hand reflexively pulled the phone away from my ear.

  “So much for my fucking heart-to-heart with her after the trials,” she said. “So what’s the… what’s she saying now?”

  I think she was going to say ‘bitch’. I took in a deep breath and gave Jackie a potted version of Megan’s confession. When you broke it down to the bare essentials, it sounded pretty grim: Megan had dated both Matt and Will; there was bad feeling between her and Matt; Matt was heavily into the drugs scene; he’d been using steroids for some time and probably supplied them to Will; Megan gave him a mouthful of abuse the night he died; and then she watched him die and ran away.

  I stuck to the essentials, leaving the part about Megan calling Matt a waste of space out. There was no point raising the temperature. Even so, Jackie punctuated every other sentence with, “You’re winding me up,” or “Please tell me this is a joke”.

  When I’d finished, we both fell silent. I sensed Jackie was computing all the angles. It normally took her a nanosecond, but this algorithm had more variables than most.

  “And you believe her, right?” she said finally.

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Well, she hasn’t exactly been very open until now – and there might be more. Are you sure she’s told us everything?”

  The last word was loaded with innuendo and, of course, I knew what she meant. What Mimi had said about the possibility of Megan using steroids before she came to London had been playing on my mind. I didn’t feel certain of anything anymore, but I still couldn’t bring myself to think of Megan as a liar and a fake. I still couldn’t square the idea she might be a cheat, with the Megan I’d picked up off the track when she’d run so hard the lactic acid had reduced her legs to jelly.

  “Yes,” I said. “I think she has told us everything… if you mean what I think you mean.”

  “You know exactly what I mean, Liam. Is she fucking clean?

  “I think so,” I said.

  Jackie fell silent again. Mimi and I sat looking at each other, and I remembered Megan in the next room and felt strangely disloyal having this conversation.

  “Well,” Jackie said eventually. “I guess Megan being a drugs cheat might turn out to be the least of our worries – the police could try to nail a manslaughter charge on her.”

  “We were talking about lawyers…” I said.

  “How could she deceive us like that?” Jackie said, though now sounding resigned rather than angry.

  I took the question to be rhetorical and waited. It was time to get practical, and I was confident Jackie was inching towards her customary calm efficiency.

  She didn’t let me down and was soon issuing instructions. I switched the phone to speaker so Mimi could hear.

  Jackie knew a law firm she trusted and would get someone down to Newport the next day. She wanted Mimi to speak to UK Athletics
about a press statement on Megan pulling out of the Grand Prix. Above all, she thought we should be economical with our answers when quizzed by sponsors, the press or anyone else on why the police were so interested in Megan – no hint whatsoever of her being present when Matt died.

  “They don’t need to know the sordid details at this stage,” she said. “All we need to say is that it’s in the hands of the police, and there’s no suggestion Megan’s done anything wrong, and we can’t discuss it for obvious reasons.”

  The only disagreement among us was over whether or not Mimi should go back to London. Jackie wanted her at the Grand Prix where the sponsors and athletics media would be. For her, it was all about the sponsors, and she needed Mimi’s help in “managing the fall-out” at Crystal Palace. But Mimi thought she should stay in Newport. This was now a crime story with a celebrity in it, and the news reporters would be camped out here.

  “The place is swarming with them already,” she said. “This is where the body is. Not to mention Megan. Body plus Megan equals story. Newport is where the story is – and the risk to Megan’s reputation.”

  Mimi was right, I thought, but Jackie was adamant.

  “Okay, okay, but I want you at Crystal Palace,” she said, without adding ‘and I sign your invoices’.

  And then she turned her attention to me. “And Liam, are you across this steroid situation?”

  “What situation would that be?” I said.

  “Well, whatever’s going on down there with everyone wanting to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger.”

  “Not really,” I said. Unlike Mimi, I wasn’t accountable to Jackie.

  “Well, Liam darling, don’t you think you ought to be? We need to understand all the angles.”

  “I’m an athletics coach, not a social worker,” I said, feeling irritation welling-up, “but I did go to one of the gyms – and I took a beating for my trouble.”

  I hadn’t mentioned this part of the saga to Jackie until now.